The purpose of the present study was to examine the potential that parents could effectively administer an online dyslexia evaluation tool (ODET) to their children. To this end, four groups consisting of parents and trained staff were compared. Sixty-three children (36 females and 27 males) participated. The children in each group were assessed…

Many seem to believe that researcher-made tests are unnecessary, if not inappropriate, for evaluating reading comprehension interventions. We suggest that this view reflects a zeitgeist in which researcher-made (proximal) tests that align with the researchers' interventions are closely scrutinized and often devalued, whereas commercially developed…

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to…

Learning to read marks an important milestone in children. Extensive research with monolingual and bilingual children has demonstrated that language comprehension (LC) forms fundamental building blocks for reading comprehension (RC). However, mixed findings are reported among studies that compare readings skills in children with and without…

Being overconfident in one's abilities is connected to poor self-judgment and it is essential to find ways how to reduce this phenomenon. The aim of the study was to research whether the act of taking a reading literacy test can be an effective means of reducing the overconfidence effect in the sample of Slovak teachers. Using purposive sampling…

This action research project sought to understand how giving students a choice in how to demonstrate mastery of a reading would affect both grades and evaluations of the instructor, given that assessment choice might increase student engagement. We examined the effect of student assessment choice on grades and course evaluations, the two…

The authors report findings from an evaluation of the reading competence of students in selected elementary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. The work was conducted in eight schools and involved the testing of 450 students in standards (grades) 1 and 5 for competence in comprehension, oral reading, and word recognition. Methods and results relating…

The purpose of this study was to analyze published decoding tests, at the item level, to determine what decoding skills and discrete letter-patterns are assessed, and identify potential instructional implications of these measures. Twenty published word list decoding tests, either used in research or within a Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports…

Oral reading fluency (ORF) assessments measure how quickly and accurately students read within one minute. They are widely used at the elementary level; however, due to the typical structure and class sizes in middle schools, such individualized assessments are less feasible and, therefore, less frequently used. Two exploratory studies…

This study investigated the effects of imposing task- or process-oriented reading behaviors on reading comprehension assessment performance. Students in grades 5-8 (N = 275) were randomly assigned to hear multiple-choice items read aloud before or after reading a test passage and when they were and were not allowed access to the passage while…

This study investigated second language learners' fairness perceptions of a classroom-based language test and whether those perceptions were predictive of justice judgments of their language program. Classroom test fairness was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct, consisting of distributive fairness (how fairly test scores represent…

In this study, we define the term "screener test," elaborate key considerations in test design, and describe how to incorporate the concepts of practicality and argument-based validation to drive an evaluation of screener tests for language assessment. A screener test is defined as a brief assessment designed to identify an examinee as a…

In 2015, the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) introduced multiple changes in its study design, the most extensive being the transition from paper- to computer-based assessment. We investigated the differences between German students' text responses to eight reading items from the paper-based study in 2012 to text…

In this study, we examined how much change in "TOEFL® Primary™" listening and reading scores can be expected in relation to the time interval between test administrations. The test records of 5213 young learners of English (aged 8-13 years) in Japan and Turkey who repeated the tests were analyzed to examine test scores as a function of…

Gender differences in reading seem to increase throughout schooling and then decrease or even disappear with age, but the reasons for this are unclear. In this study, we explore whether differences in the way "reading literacy" is operationalised can add to our understanding of varying gender differences in international large-scale…